Best Song Ever: The Scariest Songs Ever
Pearl Jam – “Dirty Frank”
from Lost Dogs (2003; Epic)
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Though playful in spirit with its irreverent funk rock tone, the horror within “Dirty Frank” lies within the garbled lyrics. A bonus track to both the German and UK versions of PJ’s seminal debut Ten, “Dirty Frank” pays homage to the Jam’s tour bus driver who happens to be a cannibal with a hunger that can’t be satisfied on per diem wages alone. With his “recipe for Anglo-Saxon soup” and a knack for chopping up groupies in the back of the bus, Frank instills sleep deprivation and fear in the hearts of all the members of the band, and even manages to bag their then fresh faced guitar virtuoso (“Where’s Mike McCready?/ My god, he’s been ate!“). Complete with rusty bone saw sounds and the terror shrieks of Eddie Vedder, “Dirty Frank” is certainly a bad mother…SHUT YOUR MOUTH! Hey, I’m just talkin’ bout Dirty Frank. – Kevin Falahee
Throbbing Gristle – “Hamburger Lady”
from D.O.A.: The Third and Final Report (1978; Industrial)
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The experience that entails listening and bearing witness to Throbbing Gristle cannot easily be written off as “entertainment.” Indeed, if you were not writhing in tremors and cold sweat, by their standards they weren’t doing their job. With “Hamburger Lady,” Genesis P-Orridge & Co. used transgressive sound experimentation and subject matter to launch industrial music and revolutionize experimental art. With terror that roughly equates to a grainy, slow-motion snuff film, instruments are fashioned to replicate hospital ambiance: a slow, rhythmic heartbeat, a vacuum cleaner, the sirens of an ambulance outside. Over all this, the clinical, echoed and distorted narration of Genesis reads off a medical report of a female burn victim, separated by ghostly whispers of “hamburger laaaaadyyyy.” The vocal distortion doesn’t clarify the entire narrative, only some of the details can be easily heard which, intentionally or unintentionally, entices our morbid arousal to keep listening as TG calmly lectures to you what pain really is. – Chris Morgan
Mountain Goats – “In the Hidden Places”
from Get Lonely (2006; 4AD)
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Unable to find a song that truly scares me in my library, owing possibly to my extreme macho-ness, possibly to my skimpy selection of Xiu Xiu, I’ve come across a song that conveys a certain type of fear, not exactly a startling or grotesque fear, but more of a nervous fear, a debilitating social fear that The Mountain Goats exemplify greatly in their song “In the Hidden Places” on Get Lonely. The lyrics describe a somewhat bored person who wanders around town barefoot, thinks of his past, and suddenly sees an unnamed “you” that makes him turn his head, shut his eyes tight, and dream about the flowers, “that hide from the light on dark hillsides…in the hidden places.”
The song describes someone who is unable to calibrate himself to certain social rules. He wants to call out to “you,” but is afraid of what “you” might think of his manner, his eagerness, what sort of messy knots “you” might construe him into. This fear has led him to close up, shut his eyes, and hide away in the middle of a crosstown bus. He goes home, thinks about “you / like a desperate policeman / searching for clues.” When he feels like he almost passes out, he shuts his eyes again, “headed for the dark hillsides, in the hidden places.” He is not only afraid of the social situations he gets himself into, but is also afraid of himself. He knows that he is weird, just as much as “you” know he’s weird, and he “wished I were someone else,” because he can’t face what he does, how he hides, always hiding. This apt description is sung in a tone fraught with timidity, uneasily trying to keep itself strong and standing on the edge of violin strings drawn taut, tense; feelings of ineptitude, awkwardness, all pull tight around “the hidden places,” everything capitulating to a fear that has become the entire world, even “the hidden places.” When I first heard this song, I felt my own fears replicated. I don’t feel so twosome when I hear the song now, but the song still irks me along the edge, reminding me of fears I once had, of bogeymen who lived everywhere, in all “the hidden places.” – Paul Bozzo
Metallica – “One”
from And Justice For All (1988; Elektra)
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Back in the good old days, when MTV used to actually show videos, I would often stay up late and catch the latest from Pearl Jam, Snoop Dogg and Adina Howard. Though among these pop favorites, there was one video that continues to give me the heebie-jeebies to this day-“One” by Metallica. Using clips from Johnny Got His Gun, the video relies heavily on the plot in which a man suffers catastrophic injuries and remains immobile and confined to his hospital bed. The cold detachment in which the hospital staff refers to the patient always creeps me out, and it gives me the same anxiety that I get from hospitals. The song alone does not creep me out, in fact it’s one of my favorite Metallica songs, but the combined aspect of the song and video just gives me the willies. – Jackie Im
Liars – “Let’s Not Wrestle Mt. Heart Attack”
from Drum’s Not Dead (2006; Mute)
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Man, what the hell is that sound? Is it a guitar? A bass? A keyboard? The prevalent sound that drives “Let’s Not Wrestle Mt. Heart Attack,” the second track on Liars’ Drum’s Not Dead, is akin to the amplification of an extremely large dental drill, or perhaps the wrath of an angry god with EQ treatment. The latter seems more appropriate, given the tribal nature of the song, the band member’s beginning the song with howling in unison before the primal beats begin. But that sound, it grinds and it grates, it gets into the psyche and it digs and digs. Yet that sound, that fearsome, impenetrable sound, remains constant, a linear thread upon which the rest of the song begins to build, voices building, drums clanging with vicious intensity. As it comes to an abrupt stop and “A Visit From Drum” takes over with minimal simplicity and calm, the fiery rush subsides, but it might take a minute or so for your heart rate to drop to a normal level. – Jeff Terich
Brutal Truth – “Dementia”
from Sounds of the Animal Kingdom (1997; Relapse)
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It seemed for a time, in the wake of Napalm Death-or at least their most groundbreaking lineups-that grindcore and death metal were barreling down on the bullet train to self parody. But Brutal Truth’s seminal Sounds of the Animal Kingdom, from the frighteningly aggressive cover art of the half-man/half-gorilla to the noise experiments, proved that they at least dealt in serious matters. What makes “Dementia,” its opener, such an appropriate title is that Bill Anderson’s production makes it sound like it was coming from a padded cell and comes off as restrained rage. This is grindcore for the fourth world, after all development, sensibility and civility have been effectively nullified and everyone, as Keven Sharp so poetically puts it at the end of the disc, is prey. – Chris Morgan
Scott Walker – “Jesse”
from The Drift (2006; 4AD)
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Once a romantic British crooner in the ’60s, Scott Walker turned to extremely disturbing sonic and lyrical fields on Tilt and merely took them to their illogical extremes on 2006’s The Drift. Any track on either of these albums would do fine for psychological damage, but “Jesse” takes it that much further. Walker combines themes of 9/11 with a fictional conversation between Elvis Presley and his stillborn twin brother Jesse over horror movie strings and cold sweat-inducing pockets of silence. He sings of “six feet of fetus flung at sparrows in the night” and hopelessly moans “I’m the only one left alive” over and over again in his own tragic madness as the music falls away into a crippling nothingness. – Jeff Terich
Radiohead – “Climbing Up the Walls”
from OK Computer (1997; Capitol)
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OK Computer may be one of my all time favorite albums, but that doesn’t stop me from having to skip over “Climbing Up the Walls” every now and then. From an artistic standpoint, the song is beautifully done and marks as a major turning point in Radiohead’s sound-built even more strongly on synthesizers than any other song on the album. However, the foreboding and disturbing nature of the song comes through, sometimes making it difficult to listen to. Thom Yorke commented on the song saying, “this is about the unspeakable. Literally skull-crushing.” The intense lyrics were in part inspired by Yorke’s stint working at a mental hospital and he more than captures the experience. – Jackie Im
Deerhunter – “Dr. Glass”
from Fluorescent Grey EP (2007; Kranky)
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Perhaps only Deerhunter, a band whose aesthetic has shifted from raw, abrasive noise to gauzy shoegaze-inflected pop in merely two albums and one EP could make handclaps sound creepy, and yet, never have I been so discomforted by the rhythmic slapping of hands as when I heard “Dr. Glass.” The keyboard drone coils itself around loosely strummed guitars, a woozy extraterrestrial emerging from a helium haze. Leave it to frontman Bradford Cox to unfurl equally nerve-tingling lyrics, broody dystopian fantasies and morbid observations about the state of civilization. Strangest of all may be the nonchalance with which the words are delivered, as if the line “In the world/ so many/ useless bodies/so much traffic” could sound more bizarre. But the song is tranquil. So much so that to later hear Cox utter “The children missing/ the corpses rotting/ in the cities/ spotting the globe,” comes much less like a shock and more like a gentle psychic caress, reassuring the listener that in spite of all this death and destruction, the inevitable societal decay, everything will be just fine. – Mars Simpson
Entrance – “Silence on a Crowded Train”
from Prayer of Death (2006; Tee Pee)
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When you consider that more people have a phobia of public speaking than of death, one wonders if the final sail into the great beyond isn’t as scary as it seems. Yet the impression that one would take from Entrance’s Prayer of Death is that it’s inevitable, perhaps peaceful, and that it’s one thing that all human beings have in common. Still, it sounds even scarier in this context, because Guy Blakeslee bellows and moans with the soul of a Delta Bluesman and the fire of Hell rising beneath. “Silence on a Crowded Train” finds his bluesy, Eastern-influenced locomotive chugging into the depths, his own howling seemingly coming from another plane while Paz Lenchantin’s violin adds just the right supernatural touch to push America’s number two fear up to that top spot again. – Jeff Terich
Suicide – “Frankie Teardrop”
from Suicide (1977; Red Star)
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Bruce Springsteen – “State Trooper”
from Nebraska (1982; Columbia)
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Of all the songs I’ve heard that I would deem fit for a genuine scare, “Frankie Teardrop” is the one to which I have the most trouble returning. With little more than the perpetual shake of a drum machine and Alan Vega’s voice, it’s a descent into the most horrifying domestic situation imaginable. Frankie has a job, working 7 to 5 to support his family. But he can’t make ends meet. His paycheck isn’t enough. They can’t eat, they’re getting evicted, and Frankie turns to violence, killing his children and his wife, the narration of which is sickening on its own, but made far worse by the pained, ear-piercing screams from Vega. This could very well be the most frightening song in existence.
After Suicide released their self-titled debut, they found a fan in none other than New Jersey’s favorite son, Bruce Springsteen, who drew influence from the New York punk duo on his acoustic, home-recorded Nebraska in 1982. His song “State Trooper” seems almost his own take on “Frankie Teardrop,” though about seven minutes shorter and far less explicit. Springsteen still lets out a startling yodel amidst the relative silence, just like Vega, but instead turns his subject matter toward internal paranoia instead of murderous events. As the song’s protagonist prays that the trooper doesn’t pull him over, he confesses, “maybe you got a kid/ maybe you got a pretty wife/ but the only thing that I got’s been botherin’ me my whole life.” – Jeff Terich
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – “Red Right Hand”
from Let Love In (1994; Mute)
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The fact that this song appears in the X-Files TV show, then becoming the impetus for creating a soundtrack for the show, shows up in all three Scream films, as well as being covered for the movie Hellboy is reason enough to consider it ‘scary.’ But, the truth is out there, “Red Right Hand” is scary enough all on its own. The story is like Stephen King’s The Gunslinger meets Harry Powell from Night of the Hunter. Again, what’s scary in this tale is the unknown. Who is this man with the long black coat? A murderer? A demon? Either way, “you’re one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan / Designed and directed by his red right hand.” – Terrance Terich
